Paul Gascoigne is pondering the fact he is to go on a national theatre tour
later this year, entertaining paying audiences as part of a freshly formed
double act with Jimmy Greaves.

Looking back at a life pockmarked with incident, one latterly conducted largely through an alcoholic haze, he is thinking about what he will first say when he first walks out on stage.

“Probably what I’ll say is: I can’t ------- believe I turned up.”

He has a point. The last time Gascoigne addressed the public was last spring, when, dishevelled, distracted and more than a little confused, he arrived at the scene where the fugitive Geordie gunman Raul Moat had been cornered by police.

Armed only with a takeaway, he was offering his services as a mediator. When his approach was turned down, he responded with a barely coherent radio interview in which he blathered on about Moat being someone who could use a chicken curry.

It was an incident that might have been comical had it not been so depressing. For those of us of a certain age, who recall the joy he delivered on a football pitch, watching the man who had once cheered up the nation with his dash, his élan, his childlike enthusiasm finally brought low by a 15-year dependence on the booze was close to heartbreaking.

At the rate of decline he demonstrated that day in the Durham countryside, the next time we expected to see him was in a coffin.

But here he is, sitting in an office in Bournemouth, looking spry, the liverish pallor that hung about him for so long replaced by a glow of health. The only thing that betrays his recent past is a slight tremor in his handshake.

He has been sober for five months now. And he is looking forward to a future that looked entirely beyond him this time last year, part of which is to turn himself into an entertainer.

“It won’t be a problem for me, telling a few jokes,” he says. “After all, my life has been one long ------- joke. Sometimes I amaze myself at the stuff I did.

"It’s not often you stop a red double-decker bus with 70 passengers on board and take it over and start driving down some London high street. Then we ran off, laughing and when we were watching telly later on we’re only on the ------- news, aren’t we. I thought it was dead funny. Poor driver got sacked though. I’d do things like that all the time. I couldn’t help myself. I used to get too excited.”

That was Gazza all right: too excited. He spent the best part of 20 years living at emotional top kilter, incapable of control. He did some bad things in his time, not least assaulting his wife. Yet there was something endearingly naive about him that meant he was forgiven almost every crass transgression.

The trouble was, everyone found him endearing except himself. He hated the way he couldn’t control the need to be at the centre of attention, loathed his near Tourette’s insistence on making his presence felt in every social circumstance.

Football, it was clear even from the moment he first burst on the scene with Newcastle, was the one thing that provided him with a sense of purpose.

On the pitch he felt liberated, at training he could escape his demons; he was such a natural at times, he says, he didn’t even know how he had done some of the things he conjured up on the pitch.

But when the football finished, he was faced with a tortuous expanse of emptiness. A gap in his life he filled with booze.

“I was drinking when I was playing,” he says. “That was my problem: I liked the drink.”

Gascoigne’s ex-colleague and housemate, Paul Merson, has just published a book replete with eye-watering details of their drinking games. Merson concludes that footballers now could not behave as he and Gazza did in the Nineties, not with the medical scrutiny under which the modern pro now operates.

So does Gascoigne himself believe he might have been better off playing now, under a structure of imposed discipline, rather than in his time when there was much more personal leeway?

“Leeway? Listen, I played in Italy for four years,” he says. “There wasn’t much leeway there. Yet I managed to get a drink in. It’s down to you. Gary Mabbutt went through the same time as me and he didn’t bother with the drink.

"It wasn’t the game that drove me to drink. It was me. No one forced Paul Merson to go and have a drink, no one forced him to take drugs. It’s that person. Yeah, maybe it comes through the genes. Whatever. But don’t blame life, deal with it.”

And was it drink that stopped him dealing with life?

“Course,” he admits. “I couldn’t deal with life on life’s terms, I suppose. I’d get stitched up by people and instead of dealing with it, I’d run and hide in the drink. I couldn’t say no. I wasted a lot of money in my time, but not on the drink: I always got that for free.

"I mean, I could never go in a pub without people offering to buy me a pint. They meant well, but it wasn’t a good idea. I’m not blaming them, it’s my own fault. I didn’t have to drink it. But I did get bought a ---- of a lot of drink.”

Did he enjoy any of it?

“Ah, don’t get me wrong, I had a good time as a drunk,” he says. “Some of the mad stuff I did, it was great when it was happening. You paid the consequences later, for sure. But you can’t look back with too much regret. I wouldn’t change what happened in my career. That was great. But the drinking got out of hand. It became an obsession.”

An obsession he has tried to overcome many times.

“I’ve been to treatment centres before,” he admits. “I’ve done programmes. The last three or four years I’d go nine months sober, then bang, I’d go on a real bender for six weeks, go on holiday with the wrong crowd and go mad.

"Then the press and that, they’d think I’d been on the drink permanent, like, which was totally wrong. But that’s the thing: if you’ve been on the drink for six weeks, you can’t turn round and say, yeah but I was nine months sober. It doesn’t count.”

He even put his name to a book about his experiences as a drunk, claiming it was all in the past. Many a reader was inspired to seek help by his candour.

“Aye, the only person who didn’t take heed of what was in the book was me,” he says. “I got loads of letters when it came out. I had a pint in me hand reading them. I should have read it meself. I might have got some tips from it.

"When I went in treatment before, it was for the family or for my ex-wife. I was never really honest. I went through the treatment, but even as I was doing it, I knew I was going to drink when I left. I never gave it a chance. But this time, I’ve done it for myself. I just reached that point where I realised something had to be done.”

So how did that point manifest itself? “Handcuffs. Handcuffs made me think. Getting banged up for the drink driving doesn’t half sober you up. Sitting in a police cell, I thought, I can’t go on like this. I knew for 15 years I was an alcoholic, but I just didn’t want to stop before. Now I do.”

So last autumn, he signed up with the Providence Project, a treatment centre in Bournemouth where he spent three months in intensive residential treatment and is now in the midst of a second three-month stint as an outpatient.

“At first it was hard,” he says of a course which required him to make some substantial changes to his life and his circle. “But now I’m not white-knuckling. I’m not craving a drink all the time, like I was. I like a drink. That’s me nature. I’d like a drink now, this minute. But I can’t have just one drink, so it’s better not to have any. I’m hoping I can get me life back through this project.”

And, since part of the treatment is talking about his problems rather than attempting to hide them, his counsellors suggested it might be an idea to go public. His theatre tour with Greaves was their suggestion, and he gladly agreed. This is theatre as therapy.

“I’m pleased to talk about it,” he says. “There may be people coming to these dos who are like me, they might be drunk, struggling. They might want to hear my experience. I know what it’s like waking up in the morning wanting a drink. I know what it’s like to put everything on the line for another drink. They might look at me and think: I’m not alone. I’m happy to answer anyone’s question.”

Plus, he is in appropriate company. Greaves nearly drank himself into an early grave on retiring from the game before renouncing the booze. He has not touched a drop in more than 30 years.

“It’s great to have Jimmy. His drinking spell was a long time ago, but I’m sure he’ll be able to help me if I get an urge. You know, drink’s everywhere, 90 per cent of the country is a drinking culture. And the other 10 per cent’s like me, been on the Providence Project.”

And he has already prepared himself for some of the questions he will face. “Hardest opponent? The taxman,” he says. He should know, he went 12 rounds with the Inland Revenue at a bankruptcy hearing just last week. “They took me to court for money they’d been waiting on for three years. The thing is, it was people using my name to make money. I never saw any of it. Now they’ve given us time to sort it. And we will. I’m paying it off now, it’s not a problem.”

Indeed, he says, that is the best part of being sober: getting back parts of his life that seemed to have gone completely out of kilter.

“I changed everything. Sacked me agents, got new advisers. I used to get promised this and that, it never materialised. I had one way of coping with it, drinking. And that made it worse. Now I’m using top lawyers to sort out the mess. Quite a few people will be getting some letters from me soon.”

Including, he says, the News of the World. Gascoigne alleges he was one of many high-profile people who had their phone tapped by the paper.

“The thing is, when I was getting tapped I knew I was. And I was telling everyone, I’m being tapped, I’m being tapped. And because of the drink, people just thought I was going mental and paranoid and that.

"More people thought that, worse it got. Actually I did go mad for a couple of months, I had to get help. Then I find out I was right all along, the police tell me I was being tapped. I tell you what, I’m glad I’ll be sober to see them in court.”

For information and tickets for the Gazza and Greavsie Show, including VIP packages featuring the opportunity to meet the entertainers in person, visit www.a1sportingmemorabilia.co.uk